Manifesto

Sugar and starch: they underlie not only our modern obesity epidemic, but also, to a surprising degree, much of our scourge of modern chronic diseases: diabetes, heart disease, PCOS, even cancer and Alzheimer's.

Generally speaking, a diet that restricts sugar and starch can be termed a low-carb diet.

By "diet," I don't just mean a reducing diet, followed for weight loss (or "slimming" as they say in the U.K.). The health benefits of cutting carbs are numerous.

The story of how sugar and starch became widely available, first to a few scattered groups of humans, and ultimately across the globe in a myriad of forms, is no less than the story of human civilization itself. It's a story of wealth and conquest, slavery and disease, luxury and overcrowding, environmental bounty and devastation.

Over the past fifty or so years, another story has played out as well: the demonization of fat. That's a story of politics and personality, where the views of a charismatic few pravailed, and the findings of the less socially adept became buried, despised, ridiculed. It's a story of how frighteningly easy it was to subvert the great body of human opinion, grounded in millennia of experience and common sense, enshrined in lore and literature ("the fat of the land" is a positive image, for instance) -- to do no less than brainwash the general public to accept the notion that dietary fat is, as a general thing, harmful. Millions of thoughtful folk have reduced the calories from fat in their diets, nearly always to replace them with calories from carbohydrate. Obesity and other ill effects have soared during this time.

Lowcarbarama is here to help the thinking person connect the dots.

Today there's a wealth of news, reportage, opinion and debate on low-carb related topics. Interviews with prominent journalists who are hot on the trail. Scientific findings. Bogus spins and obfuscation on the same. Popular press coverage that ranges from the misguided to the moronic to the almost-on-target. Insightful blogs, forums, web sites. Historical perspectives.

Lowcarbarama is designed to be a place where you can find out about as many of these varied resources as possible.

Do you know of an article, book or video that relates to this subject? Leave a comment and I'll try to link to it here. Help build a doozy of a lowcarbarama!